Douglas Carswell's Blog

Localism - yesterday's lesson on how not to make it happen

Congratulations to Joe Anderson, Liverpool's new Mayor. Having a directly elected civic leader - almost regardless of which party holds the post - will be good news for the city.

But there's no getting away from it. Yesterday, voters in Manchester, Coventry, Nottingham and Bradford rejected the idea of directly elected mayors. Birmingham is thought likely to have vetoed the move, too.

These are disappointing results for us localists. One of the Coalition's flagship localist policies, which was designed to revive English local government, has fallen flat on its face in a number of cities.

The case in favour of dispersing power outward and downward from Whitehall remains strong . Perhaps the lesson from yesterday is that directly elected mayors ain't the way to do it.

Why? Because arguing in favour of directly elected mayors - rather like the arguments in favour of unitary councils - are all about trying to change the shape of local government. A real localist ought to devolve power - and then let local government shape and define itself. Think Hayek, not Descartes.

In The Plan, Daniel Hannan and I steered clear of the arguments about the shape and structure of local authorities. Should council X amalgamate with Y? Ought town Z run its own municipal services? City-regions or simply cities?

So long as there is a correlation between how people vote locally, the taxes they pay locally and the local services they get, leave it to them to decide. Give local government control over tax and spending decisions, and local democracy will shape itself. Localise the money - and let everything else follow the money.

Once you have genuine local democracy, you won't need to have central government trying to define the shape and structure of it. And when it comes to deciding who makes the decisions for their city, local voters won't be left asking "what's the point?", like many did yesterday.

Perhaps the real lesson in all this is that we should not leave it to the Whitehall establishment to make localism happen.

Far from being a radical new idea, directly elected mayors were once favoured by the Blairites, too. Officials under pressure from Coalition ministers to bring forward policies that ticked the localist box would have found it easy to dust off the folder marked "Elected Mayors".

What a pity they never seemed to prepare a folder marked "A Local Sales Tax", or "How Local Councils could set and collect fuel duty and business rates". But if you have a Policy Unit stuffed full of civil servants, maybe that is what always happens ....

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